


dust and ashes

by ctimene



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Foggy Nelson, Post-Defenders, Suggestions of PTSD, assumed major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 12:40:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11944410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ctimene/pseuds/ctimene
Summary: Foggy had dropped the first clod on the coffin lid. The echo of earth hitting the hollow box stays with him through the days that follow. An emptiness. That’s what Matt is now. An empty box, an empty apartment, an empty life.He knows there’s a body, somewhere beneath the rubble. Bodies. Well. Parts.





	dust and ashes

**Author's Note:**

> Trying to write my way out of a little writer's block with pure misery, apparently.
> 
> Content Warning: This features descriptions of what human remains can be like after disasters. Also implied PTSD and the death of a major character. Cheery stuff.

They bury an empty casket. Cremation isn’t the no no it once was for the Catholic Church, but Matt’s always — was always — a traditionalist. In the service sense, not the whole abstaining from bondage gear and dispensing justice with backflips sense. So. A casket, in a church, and a sermon from Fr Lantom that cut a little close to the bone, and a eulogy Foggy almost can’t give, then a burial. 

Dust to dust, yadda to yadda. It’s not  _real_.

Foggy had dropped the first clod on the lid. The echo of earth hitting the hollow box stays with him through the days that follow. An emptiness. That’s what Matt is now. An empty box, an empty apartment, an empty life. That last one’s Foggy’s, technically, but who’s keeping score?

He knows there’s a body, somewhere beneath the rubble. Bodies. Well. Parts. 

Brett told him once, maybe eight, nine months after the Incident, how recovering bodies worked. He was a beat cop then, keeping some of the cordons, while Foggy was still at Columbia, walking to school past students wearing masks over their mouths as the smoke particles settled all over the city. 

Foggy had seen the pictures of bodies in the streets — aliens and humans, mangled together by those guns, those beasts, the falling debris. But eight months in and the death toll was still not official, and Brett had looked at him with blank eyes and explained. “The buildings that came down, Nelly. We don’t know how many were inside. Shit, you really want to know this?”

Foggy had been interested, horrified but interested, and Brett had just been… tired. Angry. Foggy had done his duty, bought him beer after beer. Brett had already done his.

“It’s fragments. I can’t- It’s not like a murder, a bad murder. I’ve seen- hollowpoints, Nelson, you ever defend someone who used hollowpoints and we’ll have words, that’s nasty, that’s nothing a mother should have to see. But this. They’re combing over buildings that could hold a thousand people looking for teeth. Layer after layer, they’re using toothbrushes and shit and half of what they find isn’t even useable. Too burnt for DNA. It comes out in bags you couldn’t get a hand in, all these scraps… meat. Bone. But the forensics, the med staff? They say most of them are pulverised. They’re dust and ash.”

Foggy had borrowed a breathing mask from a med student the next day, worn it for a week until he felt stupid and Matt made a comment about his voice being muffled or weird, or whatever. He’d avoided Brett as well, and deserved the shit he got for it from Bess later. Sometimes he’d tried to be callous in his own thoughts — he was a New Yorker, what was a little bone dust to him among the rat piss on the subway and whatever the smell was from the river? But it sat uneasy on him, and so, like most people do with most uncomfortable things, he pushed it out of his mind. He forgot.

Now he stands at the edge of the Midland Circle cordon on his way home from work. There’s a car that hasn’t been moved since the collapse, covered in a fine sheen of grey dust. Tiny pieces of cement skitter across the sidewalk in the breeze, and Foggy wraps his wool coat a little closer. 

He doesn’t wear a mask. He probably should — toxins and carcinogens and childhood fucking asthma — but that’s a little much for him. There’s only one Man in the Mask, after all. Was. Besides, he knows there’s no chance of — the very idea makes his skin creep, but there is  _no chance —_  breathing inremains. He’s heard what the hole was like, how deep. How many layers are between him and  _him._

He stands there until the sun sets, and the vast overhead lights flick on, like stadium lights, and the teams working through the rubble keep going, ants over an anthill. Foggy wonders if — if — they ever get deep enough, if it could be like Pompeii. Like the lovers, in each others’ arms for eternity. He thinks, from what Claire, Luke, even Jessica, grudgingly, have said, it might be like that.

The Pompeii figures are casts, he remembers. Hollowed out ash filled with plaster, where flesh and bone burnt away in the heat. Christ, every time, he always comes back to something empty. Something not there where Matt was, and he should probably, definitely, stop thinking about it, but it’s been hours (days, coming up on weeks) so, yeah, sure thing, boss. 

But maybe it’s better. An emptiness. Fuck knows he’s seen too much of Matt made bloody. Made flesh.  _Meat_. Ground up by the city and its demons. Sometimes, though, he imagines it’ll happen. They’ll find a hand. A knuckle. Two rib cages, intertwined.

Sometimes Foggy has to excuse himself from meetings to vomit. Not now, rocking back and forth on his heels, in front of the wreckage, not even watching any more, although one cop — a beat cop, keeping a cordon, like Brett all those years ago — keeps an eye on him, for… well. What could he do? What further devastation could he bring?

He doesn’t let himself think of the impossible. Of an air pocket. Of how Matt’s breathing shifts when he’s in pain, when he’s meditating, shallow and slow. Of the strength in his arms — Elektra’s too — of how a body might drag itself into- what? A tunnel? A sewer? No. He doesn’t think it, because there’s not a way that doesn’t end with blood, and death, and something a little more real than an empty casket, a plaster cast. Realer than dust. 

A cough. It’s the cop, and Foggy snaps out of looking at the drag of rubble over rubble. The wind has picked up again. His eyes are dry, but stinging, his skin is raw. There’s grit in the creases of his coat cuffs, his lapels, at the corner of his mouth. So he wipes his face and looks up, at the last emptiness he came here to see, the gap in the sky where the building once blocked out the light and the dark. There are no stars to look back. 

When he turns to go, the dust and the ash scrape under his heel, lift for a second, and settle again. He carries some with him all the way home.


End file.
